Erik H. Erikson

Gandhi's Truth

"Profound and enlightening. . . . Expands our grasp of some of the ultimate questions of our time."—Robert Jay Lifton, The American Scholar

In this acclaimed study of Mahatma Gandhi, the renowned psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson explores how Gandhi succeeded in mobilizing the Indian people both spiritually and politically, as he became the revolutionary innovator of militant nonviolence and India the motherland of large-scale civil disobedience.

"It is the triumph of Erikson's book that in uncovering the inner sources of Gandhi's power it does not dissolve but deepens his inherent moral ambiguity. . . . [This] penetrating book . . . deepends out understanding not only of the inward sources of personal greatness but those, as well, of its self-defeat."—Clifford Geertz, New York Review of Books

"Gandhi's Truth, even more brilliantly than its predecessor, Young Man Luther, shows that psychoanalytic theory, in the hands of an interpreter both resourceful and wise, can immeasurably enrich the study of 'great lives' and of much else besides. . . . [The book's] richness and almost inexhaustible suggestiveness . . . cannot be conveyed in a summary."—Christopher Lasch, New York Times Book Review